Tuesday, May 31, 2011

My wife, Kelly Anne, is working on another set of d20 hairsticks this is the first to be completed. Note this is also one of her special color changing hairstick. In sunlight the hairstick portion changes from beige to a deep purple.

Tipped in glimmering amethyst Swarovski crystal, the red purple speckled d20 die focal of the Dappled D20 Hairstick is clasped between a pair of sooty gunmetal Tierracast pewter scalloped caps above an ornate beadcap on the warm pearl birch wood stick encased in a special paint that becomes wine purple in sunlight under a protective polyurethane gloss. The more intense the sunlight, the brighter and more saturated in color this stick becomes.

The Dappled D20 Hairstick is 7 1/4" long, and it has a usable length of 5 15/16".

Now, get as many Aliarose hairsticks as you like and only pay $4.95 for Priority Mail in the US, $4.95 first class to Canada, and $5.95 for first class to any other destination on the planet--no additional fees! http://www.etsy.com/shop/Aliarose

Monday, May 30, 2011

Saturday was game day for my Swords & Wizardry campaign at the Gold Star Anime. Particularly interesting for this session is that Dwayne of Gamer's Closet had dropped the second batch of 3D Dungeon tiles he has made out of wood. The preview of which you can see in theseseriesofposts.

RosterAlagahzar, Human Mage of the Order of ThothHazar, Human ThugRiordan, Dwarven Paladin of the Battle Maiden (Mitra)The Priestess of Silvanus (Elven cleric)Grog (Orc Soldier)Hunter the Halfling FighterHeimdell, the Dwarven Runecaster

I didn't use them right off as the group left off in the Brother's tower of Tegal Manor

The below shows them running into the undead guards and wights on the second level.

The 4th level cleric automatically turned the skeletons causing them to quail against the tower walls as the party dispatched the wights. Unfortunately one of the wights successfully struck Hunter the Halfling Fighter causing him to drop from 6th level to 5th level.

The party continued down the stairs and found themselves in a 5 foot wide passageway. Now comes in Dwayne's dungeon tiles. After a search they find two secret doors. Opening the first one they found themselves in a alchemy laboratory. Apparently whoever was working here last was trying to transmute copper into gold. In the lower right corner they found barrels of a powder that transmute flesh into stone as well as another barrel with powder that does stone to flesh. While they were poking around a fire elemental erupted from the cauldron of lava in the middle of the room and was stopped by Hazar the Thug throwing a pottery flask filled with the flesh to stone powder. The elemental turned into lava and collapsed to the floor.

Next the party entered the Game Room where they found several green felt card tables, two bowling alleys, a toy chest, and a magical organ that played itself! On one of the tables was a deck of cards. A magical deck of cards.(cue ominous music)The Deck of Many Things!

There was a scramble as half of the party lined up to draw from it. For most it was a wash, as they gained XP and then lost a level from the draws. However for Alaghazar his hubris got the better of him and he drew both the Queen of Clubs and the Queen of Spades, he was killed and then turned into stone.

The bowling alley had two animated bowling balls that proceeded to attack the party. Heimdell took care of one by grabbing it and using it to bowl a strike (He rolled a natural 20). Hazar kick the other down a giant rat hole in the corner of the room where they heard it roll away. The party congratulated Hazar on his thinking as the party despised the rat tunnels under Tegal Manor.

Next the party went through the second secret door.

It opened up into a bedroom where a women that was completely yellow lay sleeping on the bed. Her hair was yellow, as well as skin and clothes. Hazar went to examine her and carefully checked her pulse. Then her body collapsed into a cloud of Yellow Mold spores which Hazar died from after inhaling them. Fortunately Janus the Elven Cleric was still upstairs in the Brother Tower and could cast Raise Dead. (Janus was played by the store owner and he couldn't play that day, but he did come down to the game room to perform the Raise Dead).

Also it turned out that the keg in the corner was filled with poisoned wine. Riordan the Dwarven Paladin wisely let the Priestess of Silvanus check it out before consuming it.

The party checked out the south door.

There they found a room covered with piles of giant rat droppings and a giant rat hole gnawed out of the floor. Note that the Dwarven Forge folks really need not to paint one of their coin piles that particular shade of brown.

The party decided to forego searching that room and instead searched the closets of the room where the yellow lady was located. In one of them they found a secret door.

Opening it up they found themselves on the west wall of a huge hall with a throne at one end. The hall was covered with webs and there were nearly two dozen large spiders crawling around. Also they were treated to the unusual sight of six men in guard uniforms beating on the body of a giant rat. Despite being sympathizing with what they were doing the Paladin sensed they were undead zombies. Also webbed to one of the pillars was a Elven Knight who started shouting that he needed rescue. (The replacement character for Alaghazar).

Careful placement of a fireball, the priestess of Silvanus turning the zombies, and the fighter being able to use their multiple attack (spiders were less than 1 HD) resulted in the room being quickly cleared. The only causality was Hazar who wound up paralyzed.

After searching the room the party decided to search the rate dung room. Finding nothing except the sound of a bowling ball rumbling from the rat hole they continued southwards.

They passed through an empty room but unfortunately, Riordan, the dwarven paladin fell into a 20 foot pit in front of the south door. When that was sorted out the party found the door opened to a long gallery of portraits. Note the small six sided dice marks where the portraits are.

From previous experience the party knew that they each could have a magical effect on the viewer. Grog the Orc ran up to one and promptly disappeared. The Elven Knight peered at another and found himself unable to speak louder than a whisper. While the party considered what happened to Grog, the Elven knight continued to look around.

Found another picture, that allowed him to levitate, and finally watching one of a usurper killing a king that turned into a map to the throne room. At this point he promptly took off thinking there was great treasure to be found. Hazar was watching this, grabbed Heimdell, and the two gave chase.

They wound up in the throne room, an area already explored. After looking around they decided to hack up the throne figuring the treasure was hidden there. A single golden ring fell out, the Master ring to the 26 servitor rings that was found earlier! After a tussle, Hazar wound up buying the ring from the Elven Knight.

Back in the portrait gallery Riordan, the Dwarven Paladin, and the Priestess of Silvanus decided to go after Grog.

They wound up another bedroom and saw that a secret door to the east was opened. They came just in time as they found Grog laying on the ground nearly dead. The paladin healed him back up to 2 hit points, when he was attacked from behind. Whirling around he saw nothing! Puzzled again he was stuck again and his stomach nearly ripped opened as he took 25 points of damage! An Invisible Stalker just struck a critical blow. Luckily the Invisible Stalker focused on the paladin and while beating him down to 8 hit points, Grog hit the creature with two mighty blows, one a critical. They proved enough to bring down the stalker. The Priestress then teleported in time to heal them.

Exploring the rest of the area they found little of anything in the room they appeared in, including it's two closets. The next room to the west was a bedroom that was filled with dozens of small frog with a single huge toad in the middle. They were quickly dispatched with a flask of oil. Searching they found a five foot corridor to the west and that lead to an abandoned magical laboratory where they found healing potions and an amulet that gave +4 save vs poison.

Dwayne's new dungeon tiles worked out really well. All that needed in the future is to change the mix of pieces. I needed more 2x2 with a single wall, 2x2 tiles, 2 by 4 tiles, and 2 by 4 with a single wall. I will be continuing to use these in future games.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

The Adobe tools are very expensive for hobbyist publishers and in some cases overkill. Luckily there are several free open source tools out there that can be used by the hobbyist to publish their materials. Among them are Gimp, Inkscape, and Scribus.

Learning them can be pretty daunting but fortunately a beginner's guide for Scribus, a desktop publisher has been released that you can purchase. In addition to covering Scribus, it has teaches how to integrate programs like Inkscape and Gimp into producing your document.

Friday, May 27, 2011

Over on Gothridge Manor, Rusty wrote a great piece on the idea of first and second position. It was very illuminating. I also know where he is coming from because of the years I spent managing live-action roleplaying events.

The basic issues is live-action is well... live. That means you need to have people in certain location at certain times with certain props and the set for the area all properly built. It also means if you don't plan well you find yourself in the middle of the event with your entire staff sleeping. All this means that live-action plot is basically a huge railroad. I ran some great live-action events but many of them would sucked badly as a tabletop session.

I lucked out with my first event in that my plot was heavy on NPC doing things (the roles played by staff) and roleplaying. As long as I didn't wear everybody out I was able to keep the event going at a fun pace.

The experience left me wondering what I hell I am going to do in the future. I was kinda aware of the limitations but didn't know how bad of a railroad live-action plot was until I had to do it myself.

So rather than wind up frustrated and return to being a player, I decided I was going to push on and learn how to run good LARP plot despite the limitations. And for the most part I feel I succeeded.

After the birth of Gregory in 2003 I no longer had the time or energy to run LARP events and tabletop gaming returned to being my primary hobby activity. I found the my LARP experiences really helped my tabletop. It helped my roleplaying (i.e. funny voices :D), being able to describe the action better, and finally made realize that I could make other styles of refereeing as fun as the sandbox game that dominated my pre-larp tabletop refereeing. As Rusty wrote about, I learned to play the second position in refereeing.

For those who are interested, the key techniques that worked for me in LARP events where

Schedule staff in groups of five for two to three hour blocks.

Pace the activity level so Friday Night estabilshes the plot, Saturday Late Morning, and Early Afternoon build tension, Late Saturday Afternoon has a plot climax. Follow by an early Sat Evening build tension, then a Saturday Late Evening grand finale.

Build your event plan to allow the plot to have many paths but one destination. So if something unexpected comes up in Early Saturday Morning, I have stuff prepared to use in Early Afternoon and the subsequent time block that reflect what the players did.

Over events of a season try to give each players a plot where they are lead. They won't have something occur every event but over multiple events the story unfolds.

Realize between events you have a lot more flexibility to respond to what the players did.

These are a few of the things I did that helped me run fun events. The one most applicable to tabletop is the Many Paths One Destination structure and the pacing. These techniques are vital for running a fun Adventure Path.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

I concluded refereeing my Monday night Swords & Wizardry campaign which had a great finish. So now I am playing in Rusty Battle Axe's campaign using Castles & Crusades. I created Anbar a Human Illusionist. He is a basically a good guy but doesn't take much seriously. The first session went pretty good but we have some work to do to come together as a party. Dwayne's Father Dani (pronounced deny) was much more devout than I expected. Tim's bard's seem more compatible with Anbar's outlook but there is stuff swimming under the surface of that character too. It will come together.

Rusty did a great job as a referee especially with his NPCs. Plus I was wondering if my line-up of illusionist spells would be of any use but proved useful in getting the fox that was preying on the local's chickens.

The things I need be careful of is making sure that Anbar and Father Dani doesn't turn into what happen in another campaign with my character, Sir Hawk, and a character named Sir Jeffery played by another friend named Dave. Pretty much the values of Sir Hawk and of Sir Jeffery conflicted on every level. I was a Knight who served the people, land and king. Sir Jeffery was a Knight Templar first and foremost and damn anybody who got in his way.

I was aware of what Dwayne was planning to do, so decided to make Anbar basically a good guy who agrees with what Dani so devoutly preaches. He just likes having a good time too and not fussy in the way it gets done. Sometimes positively irreverent due he once a street urchin. We will see how it goes, I think it will work out.

Since I am not refereeing Mondays any more I decided to referee the game at the Gold Star Anime more often. Due to scheduling conflicts for the player I will still do the once a month games but will now do short evening sessions on Tuesday every two weeks. The first one was this Tuesday and saw the continuation of the exploration of Tegal Manor.

It started a bit chaotic due to the number of new players, including my wife Kelly-Anne! We been going up to Gold Star for a couple weeks now for board games and now she decided to sit on my roleplaying session. She rolled up a Human Burglar named Alia Juliet Day. A roll on Jeff Rient's XP Charts gave her enough XP to be fourth level. The other three new players rolled a Half-Viridian/Elf Artificer (a type of magic-user), a Orc Soldier, an a Elven Cleric of Silvanus. Returning characters included a Dwarven Paladin, another Elven Cleric of Silvanus, and a Halfling Fighter.

It was a bit of a zany mix but then again Tegal Manor is a crazy place. This session saw the returning players come down the stairs from clearing out the northeast wing and meeting the new characters. After a round of introductions they explored the immediate vicinity and found no way out except the way back to areas already explored. The was an entrance to the rat tunnels so they explored that. Came across a were-rat guarding his treasure and quickly dealt with that.

Further explorations of the tunnel found an exit into a bedroom that appeared to be home to a big game hunter. A strange lizard skeleton threatened them with doom unless it was fed with rot worms. Calling on the power of Silvanus, Janus one of the elven clerics, turn it into dust. Among other things in the room was a strange glowing circle. The Orc Solider took one look stepped into it and disappeared. Half the party went "What the hell." and stepped in as well. The other half also went "What the hell" and decided to search the room and see what beyond the one door.

The Orc Solider and the others found themselves in some type of strange zoo in one of the towers. Teleported one by one, outside of the protections of the viewing area in the center of the room, the creatures attacked the individual party members . They were two giant lizards, two giant toads, a lightning beast (a small blue 3H Lizard, with a horn that can shoot lightning 3d6), a giant dire wolf, a giant rat, and two panthers.

It was pretty dicey for a while. Both the Orc Solider and Kelly Anne's burglar were half-swallowed by the Giant Toads. But when Janus teleported in she turned the tide with a well placed sleep spell. Effected nearly 12 HD of creatures. With the remaining half of party coming in the rest of the creatures were dispatched. But not before Riordan's, the dwarven paladin, little Kobold henchman died after being fried by one of the lightning beast's blasts.

The kobold's last words were (in a Harry Potter's Dobby voice)

Master, I told you bad things happen when you step on those circles.

The session ended soon after and we will pick up again on Saturday with further exploration of the tower.

This adventure is designed for 15-20 0-level characters or 8-10 1st-level characters. Remember that players should have 2-3 characters each, so they can continue enjoying the fun of play even if some of their PCs die off. In playtest groups of 15 0-level PCs, 7 or 8 typically survive. The author has playtested this adventure with groups of up to 28 PCs and experienced one complete TPK and several sessions with only a handful of survivors.

In the comment section of James' post Chicago Wizards give this comment.

Something cibet said made me realize that the point needs to be made: DCCRPG is not D&D. It may be D&Desque in its pedigree, but it's not the same in "scale" or matched to any edition. It evokes similarities, but it's expectations and execution is/are far different.

The comment is spot on, despite similarities to the d20 rules and D&D it is own thing. I felt that Harley and Joseph succeeded in channeling 70s era fantasy. The potential weakness of the DCC RPG is in it's extensive use of charts and it will live or die based on how well they are presented.

The use of the extra zocchi dice is going to a minor issue in the long run. In the playtest I ran, Fighters and other classes improved their ability to critical by using a progression of dice that included the zocchi dice. Going off the top of my head, at 1st level you would get say a d8, then at 4th a d10, then later a d12, d14, d16, d20, etc. The bigger dice allow you to get better results on a critical.

There were a couple of negative comments on the need to have multiple PCs per player. Understand that you can still use the DCC RPG and play a campaign where the player starts out with a single character struggling to survive. If you use the adventures that Goodman Games has planned they will die as they are death traps, cool death traps but death traps none the less.

If you run your campaign in more naturalistic way, the character can avoid those type of locales and focus on the challenges they can overcome. Such has working their way up to the leadership of a bandit gang, or fighting a border war between two nobles. Slowly working up to the point where they can enter one of those death trap and survive. Nothing in the playtest ruleset precludes this style of play and there is a lot of interesting bits to the rules especially the magic system. You will soon be able to see for yourself after free RPG day when Goodman Games releases the beta.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Mongoose has announced that they are dropping the agreement with Issaries for Runequest. However they are not abandoning the d100 system they developed with Runequest II. They intend to drop the Runequest references and release it as Wayfarers. There is a thread on their board devoted to the topic.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Last night I went to board game night at the Gold Star Anime. Kelly Anne and I got to play a game called Once Upon a Time. Basically it is Whimsy Cards on steroids. You have story cards and one ending card. The object of the game is to get rid of all your cards by composing a story incorporating the single word found on each of the story games that finishes with the ending written on the ending card.

The fun begins when other players can interrupt and hijack your story. Then attempt to complete it by using their cards and their ending. When you get up to seven players the result is zany, hilarious, and a lot of fun. Where you wind up with a young Queen imprisoned in a dungeon by the evil Witch upstairs, next to a cave with treasure that includes a crown, a ring, and a bottle with a cook inside dreaming about getting back to his home town of Stupidville.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

I had an odd dream last night. I bought a new fantasy MMORPG to play and when I logged in, the world and all the character/monster models looked like if they were drawn by Erol Otus. Very very surreal.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Matt Finch has released the 4th edition of the Swords & Wizardry Core rules. You can download a free copy from RPGNow here. Some of the changes include the still optional Thief Class being moved up and included in the Character Class chapter. Some additional combat rules like parrying. Along with a two page sample setting in the appendixes.

That time is based on the size of the region you choose to detail in step 4. In this case roughly 200 miles by 150 miles. The work involved increases or decreases geometrically the larger or smaller you go. This because the amount of stuff you can detail increases by how much AREA the map covers. So doubling the size of the map means four times the detail. Conversely halving the map means a quarter of the work. Something I learned when doing Acheron (a half sized map) vs the other three maps in the first Points of Lights. And is why for the blog, I just focus on a single small island for the detailed examples.

For the person trying this for the first time I strongly recommend starting small. Detail a 50 by 50 mile region centered around a barony or a city-state or an large island. Instead of the three dozen or so locales that will come out of my initial recommendation you will have only a dozen or so. The same for the detailed town, start out with a smaller size. Another option is to opt for the larger size and just have a sparse sprinkling of locales.

In his post, Flynn mentioned Zak S minimalist sandbox approach.

Create a map with interesting namesCreate a couple of interesting encounter charts for different regions.

That can work if you feel you have a good Bag of Stuff in your your head. However most people need a little more structure than Zak's list. The important thing to remember about my "How to Create to Sandbox" steps is what they cover. I organized it the way I did because eventually you will need to come up with everything on that list in the course of a sandbox campaign.

The questions you will need to answer is that are these issues something you want to deal with now or later. Before the session or on the fly as needed? A detailed writeup, a sentence or two, a random table, or wait to make it up out of your head during the session.

I can't answer these definitively because the exact mix depends on you, what you know, and what you are good at. All I can tell you is to think about the issues before the campaign so you are not overwhelmed during the session. And of course give some tips on what I did in hopes that it will help your own game.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Over on Hack-n-Slash C mentions that you can get the classic Fighting Fantasy books for the Kindle. Not only it been released for the Kindle it is also active content! So I bought Warlock of Firetop Mountain for $4.

This is the first time with Fighting Fantasy for me although I had other similar books back in the say. I got to say it is pretty damn good both the book itself and the active content that surrounds it. It rolls dice for you, manages saves, character sheet, and shows a map when needed. It is a lot of fun. Best of all it appears to have the original illustrations!

That time is based on the size of the region you choose to detail in step 4. In this case roughly 200 miles by 150 miles. The work involved increases or decreases geometrically the larger or smaller you go. This because the amount of stuff you can detail increases by how much AREA the map covers. So doubling the size of the map means four times the detail. Conversely halving the map means a quarter of the work. Something I learned when doing Acheron (a half sized map) vs the other three maps in the first Points of Lights. And is why for the blog, I just focus on a single small island for the detailed examples.

For the person trying this for the first time I strongly recommend starting small. Detail a 50 by 50 mile region centered around a barony or a city-state or an large island. Instead of the three dozen or so locales that will come out of my initial recommendation you will have only a dozen or so. The same for the detailed town, start out with a smaller size. Another option is to opt for the larger size and just have a sparse sprinkling of locales.

In his post, Flynn mentioned Zak S minimalist sandbox approach.

Create a map with interesting namesCreate a couple of interesting encounter charts for different regions.

That can work if you feel you have a good Bag of Stuff in your your head. However most people need a little more structure than Zak's list. The important thing to remember about my "How to Create to Sandbox" steps is what they cover. I organized it the way I did because eventually you will need to come up with everything on that list in the course of a sandbox campaign.

The questions you will need to answer is that are these issues something you want to deal with now or later. Before the session or on the fly as needed? A detailed writeup, a sentence or two, a random table, or wait to make it up out of your head during the session.

I can't answer these definitively because the exact mix depends on you, what you know, and what you are good at. All I can tell you is to think about the issues before the campaign so you are not overwhelmed during the session. And of course give some tips on what I did in hopes that it will help your own game.

My friend Dwayne has found a great way of making Dwarven Forge compatible Dungeons Tiles. His first post is here, and the second one here. I can't wait for him to come back to Meadville and try them out.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

They didn't the Rethem maps done so they replaced them with some bestiary articles.

The first is the second half of Rethem which details the various settlements and the nobles who rule them. Like the other 2nd edition Kingdom articles they go more into the personalities which is very helpful for gaming. You can see what this look like with this PDF. After reading it, Rethem is not a very nice place.

They also released the second half of the Bird Article. This is focused more on mundane birds and mostly of use if you are into Harn Manor type gaming.

The Chimerae article is short but interesting. It details the Griffon and the Hippogriff. Apparently the barbarian consider the Hippogriff a very stupid beast.

Then there is article on Deer which also include Elks, and moose. Mostly of use if you roleplay a hunting trip or incorporate survival rules into your game.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

On this date, fifty years ago, Alan B. Shepard was launched in Freedom 7 for the first US flight into space. It was a 15 minute sub-orbital flight using the first version of the Mercury Capsule and a Redstone Rocket. The only glitch on the flight was the confirmation light for the automatic jettison of the retro-rockets didn't come until Shepard pressed the button manually.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

If you are in college or have access to a college the best writing course you can take for writing roleplaying material is technical writing as opposed to creative writing. This is because much of writing for roleplaying games involves explaining technical concepts both clearly and concisely. The same techniques apply to descriptions of locales within a setting.

If you don't goto college or have access to college courses then look on amazon and bookstore for books on technical writing.

Working with Tim of Gothridge Manor is a major influence on my writing styles but the other major influences are the technical writing course I had to take in college and the fact that I am responsible for release documentation at my work. For example

Please note that customers should run a strip of metal through their male pittsburgh machine and measure the amount of metal it bends up. The customer then should check that the distance of their male pittsburgh seam in the software reflects that measurement.

If not enough metal is bent up the path of the male seam on heel on a radius elbow cheek piece will be longer than the female seam on the radius heel piece. When joined, the heel will then come up short.

From Blackmarsh

0616 Ruchill Burn runs through a 50’ deep gorge for over a half mile. During the Bright Empire, magic-users established a conclave here to harvest the viz found within the cliffs of the gorge. Two centuries after the empire’s fall, the conclave was abandoned. The cliffs are honeycombed with several levels of the conclave. Many of the levels span both sides of the gorge with bridges connecting them. Not all of them are safe.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Monday, we played the final session of my year long weekly campaign. Set in the Majestic Wilderlands it featured Tim as Ashling Anubis an Elven Montebank, Dwayne as Eolander an Elven Half-Viridian Fighter, and Rusty Battleaxe as Syrivald, a human magic-user of the Order of Thoth.

The campaign used the Swords & Wizardry Core Rules in conjunction with my Majestic Wilderlands supplement. As usual it was in the Main Campaign Area but this time it was focused on Viridistan instead of City-State. In fact they never got to City-State at any point instead, they mostly meandered around the Trident Gulf. The campaign started with them meeting in Gormmah and fleeing the city because they crossed the local thieves guild known as the Madmen. It ended them with them taking down a god and throwing him into the Abyss. It was a great ride and I was privileged to have refereed it.

Due to the fact I used Fantasy Grounds to run this and was present in front of a computer for the whole game. I have more notes written for this than any other campaign I ran. I will be going through them and write some posts around the more interesting ones and the techniques I used.

The campaign end session was a lot of fun and ended on a high note. The classic moment came after they downed the god Horus and were going to teleport him and the party back to Viridistan. Under Swords & Wizardry there is a 1 in 20 chance of mis-teleporting. If you do mis-teleport then there is a 1 in 6 chance you will come in low, otherwise you come in high.

Well they had to get out of the Holy Cities fast with Horus body Eolander is teleported with a 13, Ashling teleports with a 17. Syrivald cast the third teleport and send Horus body to Viridistan and rolls a 1! Then he proceeds to roll another 1 which causes the body to have been teleported low. Roleplayingwise Syrivald doesn't know this so he teleports himself and rolls a 15. He arrives and there is no Horus.

After a quick Locate Object ritual they find them 20 feet underneath their house. Knowing that they might have limited time before they have to zap him again, they enlist the city engineers and got him dug out quickly. So it ended well and they sailed to Malestrom in the Dawn Ocean where the gateway of the Abyss lies.

Monday, May 2, 2011

One of the biggest challenges of running a sandbox campaign is that the referee is simulating a world. More precisely the area of the world where the character happens to be at. While this is true of other styles of running an RPG, with a sandbox campaign there is little control over where the PC goes next. With experience, you can get pretty good at predicting where the next session is going and prepare accordingly. But in the end, you never have enough prepared. There is never enough details. There will come a time where you have to make locales and NPCs out of whole cloth on the spot.

The way to overcome this is with your bag of stuff. Everything that you played, read, experienced, or watched about fantasy, storytelling, places, and people are in your bag of stuff. While running a roleplaying session you are drawing on this to create the world in front of the players.

While this is done in all play styles, you will be called to do it more often with greater scope in a sandbox campaign. You may have to come up with a whole town within a couple of minutes while the players are travelling . A noble house, a dwarven hold, a orc warren, a merchant and his caravan; the list is endless.

Many referee are intimidated by this. The key to overcoming this is systematically thinking about what you know and developing tools to help plug the gaps.

What is your mind eye's view of a fantasy town, populate it in your head, now make another version in your mind. What different? What the same? Thinking through the various common situations in a campaign you will find that you have elements that you use over and over again. Once you identify these elements you can organize them in a sort of random table in your head. Use that to come up with with new and interesting locales, people, and situations on the fly.

The three broad areas are places, people, and situations. Places can be a settlement, or a piece of geography. People include those of different races, different personalties, and different backgrounds. Situations involve the combinations of different types of people and places. For example a slave auction, a king's court, a merchant caravan, the guards at the city-gate, show night at the tavern, etc.

When you do this will you find that you don't have very many elements for certain areas. Back in the day, you would go to the library and read up. In this day, you have the internet, wikipedia, and tons of free material out there. Some of the best tools to use are a well organized set of random tables to use as an idea generator.

While experience certainly helps to build up your bag of stuff, the good news that we all have it already. You just need to organize your mind to get at what you know. And of course read, watch, or experience as many things you can to build it up for the future.

The biggest different between me and the person just starting out refereeing a sandbox isn't the fact I have 30 years worth of detail for my setting. Is that the fact I accumulated so much in my bag of stuff that I rarely get fazed by what my players do.

There are two major things that helped me realize that I have a bag of stuff. For 25 years, Tim and Dwayne getting exasperated at me while looking things up and telling me "Rob! Just make it up." And playing two different forms of roleplaying, Live-action roleplaying (NERO), and MMORPGS (UO, Everquest, WoW, LOTRO, etc).

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.